1. I opened Emelfm as an ordinary user, found my test mp3 file and double-left-clicked on it. I got no sound and the same message as I mentioned in my last post, about the absence of an xmms skin file.2. I tried to open xmms from the desktop. There was a momentary flash on the bottom panel, but nothing else.3. I tried to play the mp3 by opening the terminal and typing xmms followed by the name of the mp3, both with and without a leading sudo. In each case I got a message that there'd been a segmentation fault, but nothing else.4. I tried to play the mp3 by opening the terminal and typing mpg123 followed by the name of the file. I got output suggesting the file was playing and, for the first time, I heard sound. However, the sound was just a chord repeated endlessly and the computer was frozen. I had to use Ctrl-Alt-Delete to reboot.

If anything further is suggested by the above, I'd be grateful to hear it.

There does remain the suggestion roberts made about using the Alsa sound mydsl extension. I'll now try to follow that, but I'm afraid I'll get the message about there not being enough space to load everything, like I earlier got when I tried to load the compiling tools. Still, I will try it.

I'm booting up from a USB flash drive on a baby computer that has no hard drive and everything works for me except sound.

As foreshadowed in my last post, I've since followed the steps in the info document for alsadebs.dsl (booting up with the "dsl alsa" cheat code, installing gnu-utils.dsl, dsl-dpkg.dsl and alsadebs.dsl and then choosing "Install ALSA" from the myDSL menu). After completing those steps, I tried to play an mp3 file by running mpg123 from the command line. I got the same result as mentioned in my last post, an endlessly repeating chord playing and a frozen screen.

If anyone has any other suggestions, I'd be happy to try to follow them. In their absence, I'm very disappointed, but thank you again to those who tried to help me.

When I run sndconfig (without ALSA installed), I'm told first that a PCI sound card has been found in my system and the details are reported: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS]lSis 7019 Audio Accelerator. Next, however, I'm told that that card is not supported.

When I go to the ALSA website, though quite a number of SiS chipsets are referred to, the 7019 is not, from which I take it that the 7019 is not supported in ALSA. That is consistent with a number of statements I've found on the Web to the effect that the 7019 works with OSS, but not with ALSA.

At the Linux Terminal Server Project website, there are instructions for installing the sis7019 module. They say one needs not only the sis7019 modules, but also the ac97_codec and soundcore modules. They say one should modify the modules.conf file by adding:

When I run lsmod, the modules are listed; when I run alias, the alias is listed.

Finally, the computer is capable of producing sound under Linux. It came with a compact flash card on which Puppy Linux had been pre-installed. I can get sound when booting up with that distribution, which has the sis7019 module by default.

However, I don't want to use Puppy Linux. I want to use DSL, which I admire from having installed an earlier version of it for someone on an old laptop. Hence, all of this pestering by me .

If you have any more suggestions, I'll give them a go, but if not, thank you again for trying.